TOUCHING HOME

TOUCHING HOMETouching Home's identical twin screenwriters, Noah and Logan Miller, direct themselves, frequently shirtless, as identical twin jocks Clint and Lane (one of them has a missing tooth, which helps distinguish them only marginally). Long floating on the almost-maybe-next-year periphery of pro baseball, the boys, after yet another cut, retreat to lick their wounds in their rural Northern California hometown, where their estranged dad (Ed Harris) is the local drunk who left the raising of his sons to Robert Forster's sheriff/Little League coach. There are a few things done right here: Baseball stuff and off-season quarry work are nicely shot, and there's a real feeling for the precariousness of life on the lower rungs. But Touching Home, which eventually devotes itself to saving dad from demon rum, has a nasty habit of cutting away right where a good scene would start, or introducing a character for no purpose. (Why even write a love interest — Ishiah Benben — if you're going to give her positively nothing to do? Or introduce Brad Dourif as a retarded uncle?) Incidentally, the film has an Inspirational True Story (and tie-in book) behind it, which comes across not at all in the rather formulaic stuff that's actually on-screen. (Nick Pinkerton) (Sunset 5)